employment

(ANTIMEDIA)  — According to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 25 percent of Americans are employed in a field that requires a license. The process for obtaining that license can be a long and costly one, as David Barnes recently detailed for Rare:

If Seattle’s risky experiment with a $15 an hour minimum wage represents the “canary in the coal mine” for cities around the country that want to increase their minimum wages to $15 an hour, those cities may want to hold off for a few years to get a final count of the “dead canaries” in Seattle before proceeding.

Many tourists flock to South Africa to take in its natural beauty, such as these flowers of the Jacaranda blossom in Pretoria [Xinhua]
The release of the Tourism 2016 report by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) this week showed that although there was a strong rebound in last year due to the weak rand, which made a holiday in South Africa very cheap for an overseas tourist, the country was still suffering from the imposition of more stringent visa requirements.

Part One

A year ago the UK voted to leave the EU after a stupid, unnecessary referendum.  And although Brexiteers pronounced this an ‘overwhelming’ result, the true facts were that, out of the total electorate, 37 per cent voted Leave, 35 per cent voted Remain, and 28 per cent didn’t bother to vote.  Hardly overwhelming.

As an intended outcome of neoliberal doctrine and a natural stage of capitalist development, global financialization constructs a borderless nexus of power in which debt and austerity fuels a cultural, political and economic landscape bound to enduring structures of domination, and creates unprecedented wealth through the accumulation of suffering.
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Almost all of the lawmakers who co-sponsored a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour hired unpaid interns to supplement their staffs. Bernie Sanders, the bill's leading voice, was the only one to pay his interns at an hourly rate. But even he only pays them $12 an hour.

It was recently reported that Hawaii may be the first US state to introduce Universal Basic Income (UBI). Given that it’s generally a good idea to be deeply suspicious of anything that any capitalist government does, perhaps this piece of news is not quite as hopeful as it may appear.

Taxes are a price, or a penalty levied on production. In that case it's no coincidence that so many movies are nowadays shot in Georgia. Hollywood’s best and brightest seek the lowest tax price (or better yet, the best tax incentive) to maximize profits in an industry defined by shrinking margins. The Peach State is very competitive on the tax front. 

While supporters of our two-party system wring their hands over the sensationalist nonsense reported by the mainstream media, we thought it might be worth touching on the most dangerous lie of all-time: capitalism. It’s an all-encompassing delusion, including: the myth of continual technological progress, the mendacious assumptions of endless economic growth, the lie that constant bombardments of media and consumer goods make us happy, and the omissions of our involvement in the exploitation of the planet and the resources of distant, poorer nations, among other things.